LITMIR.BIZ

Proving Grounds brings together a wide range of scholars across disciplines and geographical borders to deepen our understanding of the environmental impact that the U.S. military presence has had at home and abroad. The essays in this collection survey the environmental damage caused by weapons testing and military bases to local residents, animal populations, and landscapes, and they examine the military’s efforts to close and repurpose bases—often as wildlife reserves. Together they present a complex and nuanced view that embraces the ironies, contradictions, and unintended consequences of U.S. militarism around the world. In complicating our understanding of the American military’s worldwide presence, the essayists also reveal the rare cases when the military is actually ahead of the curve on environmental regulation compared to the private sector. The result is the most comprehensive examination to date of the U.S. military’s environmental footprint—for better or worse—across the globe.

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Working abroad offers adventure, friendship with people of other cultures, intimate familiarity with exciting places, and opportunities to make real differences in communities. It also presents countless challenges, ranging from packing and staying safe and healthy to balancing project objectives with on-the-ground realities, working with local officials, and forging respectful and productive relationships. These challenges and many more are tackled in How to Work in Someone Else's Country. Drawing on thirty years of experience as an international consultant in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, Ruth Stark provides guidance for anybody preparing to work in a foreign country.This easy-to-read guide is enlivened by real-life examples drawn from the author's journals and stories shared by colleagues. Slim enough to fit in a carry-on, this book is sure to come in handy wherever your work takes you.

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An exceptional storyteller with an analytical eye, Merrel Clubb has gathered the letters he sent his parents from the Pacific Theater of World War II and his subsequent reflections on that war and on his life into a kind of then-and-now memoir. The letters are a treasure trove of humor, anxiety, and hope, revealing a young man thrust into a war that he does not understand. Through this exceptional portal on the past, we learn of the tragic absurdity of war, of a soldier trained for naval warfare but sent into land battle with weapons he'd never before fired; of command post latrines at which even commanding officers were sitting ducks; of the ghoulish trophies and mementos that soldiers collected from the battlefields.The letters describe a vivid cast of characters, from Clubb's childhood friend who instilled a love of poetry in his comrades to the hillbilly singer and the prostitute with whom the young Clubb had varied amorous adventures. But the most compelling figure in this narrative is, of course, Clubb himself, an intellectual who carried Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad along with his tommy gun; who used books as a fortification for his foxhole, discovering upon waking one morning that «Ouspensky stopped a bullet»; and who, in a darkly humorous moment, wrote home that «Plato is pretty consoling, because I can always think that somewhere there is a perfect hell of a navy of which this is but an imitation or representation.»Returning to these letters years later prompts Clubb to look again at the Second World War and at the atomic bomb that ended it. In an analysis as useful to understanding our own historical moment as it is to reconsidering the past, Clubb counters the conventional wisdom shared by veterans and civilians alike, particularly regarding the concept of a «just war.»For Clubb, as for so many veterans, the war does not end with the victory over Japan. Despite the intervening years, Clubb finds that the haunting episodes experienced over half a century ago echo still. Even in the solitude of the forest, in the hunting parties he meets, in the animals he himself kills, he hears again the sound of battle, sees again the faces of the victims of war.Part letters, part memoir, and part scholarly analysis, this volume ranges over a vast, colorful, and weighted territory. From the battles and respites in the Pacific Islands, to the night clubs and call girls of mainland San Francisco and San Diego; from the relative quiet of his aptly named hometown, Stillwater, to the similarly quiet Montana backcountry, Clubb's narrative explores the psychological terrain of a life disturbed, and forever changed, by war.

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In the fourteenth-century Persian city of Shiraz, poets composed, scholars studied, mystics sought hidden truths, ascetics prayed and fasted, drunkards brawled, and princes and their courtiers played deadly games of power. This was the world of Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez Shirazi, a classical poet who remains broadly popular today in his native Shiraz and in modern Iran as a whole, and among all lovers of great verse traditions.As John Limbert notes, Hafez's poetry is inseparable from the Iranian spirit–a reflection of Iranians� intellectual and emotional responses to events. But if Hafez�s endurance derives from the considerable charm of his work, it also arises from his sure grounding in the life of his day, from a setting so deftly explored by his verse that his depictions of it retain a timeless relevance.To fully comprehend and enjoy Hafez, and thus to understand a root force in modern Iranian consciousness, we must know something of the city in which he lived and wrote. In this book, Limbert provides not only a rich context for Hafez�s poetry but also a comprehensive perspective on a fascinating place in a dynamic time. His portrait of this elegant, witty poet and his marvelous city will be as valuable to medievalists, students of the Middle East, and specialists in urban studies as it will be to connoisseurs of world literature.

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George Kennan (1845-1924) was a pioneering explorer, writer, and lecturer on Russia in the nineteenth century, the author of classic works such as Tent Life in Siberia and Siberia and the Exile System , and great-uncle of George Frost Kennan, the noted historian and diplomat of the Cold War.In 1870, Kennan became the first American to explore the highlands of Dagestan, a remote Muslim region of herders, silversmiths, carpet-weavers, and other craftsmen southeast of Chechnya, only a decade after Russia violently absorbed the region into its empire. He kept detailed journals of his adventures, which today form a small part of his voluminous archive in the Library of Congress. Frith Maier has combined the diaries with selected letters and Kennan’s published articles on the Caucasus to create a vivid narrative of his six-month odyssey.The journals have been organized into three parts. The first covers Kennan’s journey to the Caucasus, a significant feat in itself. The second chronicles his expedition across the main Caucasus Ridge with the Georgian nobleman Prince Jorjadze. In the final part, Kennan circles back through the lands of Chechnya to slip once again into the Dagestan highlands.Kennan’s remarkable curiosity and perception come through in this lively and accessible narrative, as does his humor at the challenges of his travels.In her introduction, Maier discusses Kennan’s illustrious career and his reliability as an observer, while providing background on the Caucasus to help clarify Kennan’s descriptions of daily life, religion, etiquette, customary law, and local government. In an Afterword, she retraces Kennan’s steps to find descendants of Prince Jorjadze and describes her work in coproducing, with filmmaker Christopher Allingham, a documentary inspired by Kennan’s Caucasus journey.

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Thomas Graham Jr. played a role in the negotiation of every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement signed by the United States during the past thirty years. As a U.S. government lawyer and diplomat, he helped to shape, negotiate, and secure U.S. ratification of such cornerstones of international security as SALT, START, and the ABM, INF, and CFE treaties as well as conventions prohibiting biological and chemical weapons.Graham�s memoir offers a history of the key negotiations which have substantially reduced the threat of nuclear war. His is a personal account of bureaucratic battles over arms control in six administrations, navigating among the White House, Congress, cabinet secretaries, and agencies with overlapping responsibilities and often competing interests. No comparable text brings together detailed analyses of so many pivotal documents in the history of the Cold War; it offers abundant primary source material for historians, international lawyers, and arms control specialists around the world. Disarmament Sketches also charts the rise and fall of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the only U.S. government agency with primary responsibility for arms control policy, and lays out an agenda for continuing progress in reducing weapons stockpiles around the globe.Throughout his career, Graham has worked tirelessly to reverse the nuclear arms race and to persuade leaders around the world to make their nations safer by renouncing and reducing their weapons of mass destruction.

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Mending Fences illuminates the forces driving Moscow�s China policy, from the Ussuri River clashes in 1969 to the «strategic partnership» of the 1990s. Elizabeth Wishnick analyzes the efforts of Soviet leaders simultaneously to maintain their supremacy in the international communist movement, defend their borders from a perceived Chinese threat, and ensure the compliance of regional authorities in enforcing China policy.

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Shelby Scates�s thirty-five-year career as a prize-winning journalist and columnist for International News Service, United Press International, the Associated Press, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has taken him to centers of action across this country and to wars and conflicts in many of the world�s danger zones.Born in the rural South in the 1930s, Scates rejected the racism he saw there and in his late teens set out across the United States � eventually to land in Seattle, attend the University of Washington, and launch himself into a world of work, travel, and adventure as a merchant seaman and soldier. He entered journalism as a wire-service reporter hired in Manhattan and assigned to the Dallas bureau.Reporting the political beat brought Scates to Baton Rouge and New Orleans to observe the remarkable performance and influence of Earl Long as governor of Louisiana; in 1957 to Little Rock, Arkansas, to witness a constitutional crisis, the early struggle to integrate the public schools; to Oklahoma City and Dallas; and to Washington, D.C., where he became familiar with both the corridors of Congress and Lyndon Johnson�s Oval Office and Air Force One. He was in Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and its aftermath; in Lebanon and Egypt to learn about the Palestine Liberation Organization; in the Suez to investigate the �War of Attrition�; and in Cambodia during guerrilla fighting against the Vietnamese Army.As a newsman he reported on those American climbers who triumphed, though not without suffering great personal losses, by reaching the top of K2 in 1978. Scates used his considerable journalistic experience and inventiveness to get the story of this epic climb quickly back to the United States. He also describes his own midlife climb of Mt. McKinley with two friends.In a straightforward portrayal of professional life that manifests elements of both The Front Page and All the President�s Men, this memoir is about the particular combination of idealism, persistence, skepticism, and dedication to truthful reporting that marks the best of American journalism.

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